


We Have the Time

by Storm_Cycle



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Artist Steve Rogers, Fix-It of Sorts, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mutual Pining, Painting, Pining, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Retirement, Semi-retirement, Slow Build, Slow Burn, Steve deserved better
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-28
Updated: 2019-04-28
Packaged: 2020-02-09 10:48:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18636628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Storm_Cycle/pseuds/Storm_Cycle
Summary: Endgame spoilers. I'm going to put the real summary in the author's note for now.





	We Have the Time

**Author's Note:**

> Steve goes in alone to return the stones. And for a moment— just a moment— he is tempted to look for Peggy. But then he remembers everyone that he hasn’t lost: the people he had fought so hard to get back. Steve Rogers might be a man from the past, but hadn’t he always been fighting for the future?
> 
> Steve Rogers is going to look to the future that he fought to have. And he is going to enjoy every damn minute of it. 
> 
>  
> 
> I got so mad about Steve's ending in Endgame that I ended up writing fanfiction for the first time in maybe 3 years.

Sam pushes Steve out of his sad apocalypse apartment and into a house on some land donated by Pepper in a matter of weeks. 

It’s not too far from D.C. or New York, but Steve feels completely isolated, surrounded by the woods and the beginnings of mountains. For a week, Sam helps methodically clean the house that had been left untouched for far more than the five years the world had gone half empty. Furniture is moved in, replacing the old rotten stuff that had been sagging and caked in dust when Steve had first arrived. 

When Sam leaves with the promise of video chats every week and an in-person visit in about a month, Steve stands with bare feet on the porch, waving like an idiot at the empty gravel driveway. Steve lowers his arm when the low hum of the car’s engine finally fades to nothing, and all Steve can hear anymore is the chatter of squirrels and the chirp of birds. 

He rubs a hand over the beginnings of a beard and sighs. There’s everything and nothing to do all at once. There’s a whole world to be put back together, piece by piece, but Steve’s out here supposed to be reading books or watching movies or painting a goddamn picture. The vacation was actually his own idea. Just a passing wish. A daydream, really. But he had made the mistake of talking about it aloud, and Sam had latched onto the idea like a burr and refused to let go. Steve was going to have this vacation whether he liked it or not. 

The first day without Sam was the hardest. There was nothing more to clean. No furniture to move. Nothing to put away. Moving in was all done. When Steve was young— before the serum— he had never been able to do physical labor. While Bucky worked at the docks or when he was just a kid, stocking shelves for old Mr. Goldstein, Steve was always recovering from some illness or another or working on signs and advertisements; he had never had the luxury of a mindless physical task to complete until after the serum. He found that he enjoyed the mindless repetition and exertion until all he could think about was his trembling muscles and getting the next breath of air into his lungs. It was similar, and altogether different, to the illnesses he used to get. The asthma attacks and infections, pneumonia almost every winter. The biggest difference was the peace. When Steve got sick, he was angry. When he was hauling crates or fighting Nazis, he was useful.

Now, however, Steve had no idea what to feel. He had been useful. He had killed Nazis behind enemy lines in ‘45, he had saved New York and the world at large time and time again, and finally, he had helped to bring back the half of the universe that had been lost five years before. Had he served his purpose? Was this retirement?

Watching the grass grow and the paint peel while all the other Avengers helped to put the world back together. They all said he deserved it— that he had the time. But Steve just felt guilty. 

The sun was beginning to sink beneath the trees, and the birds were beginning to settle in for the night. The hairs on Steve’s arms stood up valiantly against the cooling air, but the chill still wormed its way to just under his skin. 

It was just beginning to be summer, but the bite in the air still lingered at night, and Steve had never been partial to the cold. He turned to go inside, the storm door squealing as he opened it and banging just behind him as if to say “good riddance.”  
He would have to find things to do tomorrow. 

 

The rest of the Avengers drove fancy cars, but Steve had felt a little silly in those low, sleek machines, especially being a man of his size. He had bought a truck at a used car lot— there were quite a lot of those now— and that was what had been sitting in the driveway for the past week. 

He and Sam had been into town a few times for food and cleaning supplies, Sam stressing the fact multiple times that a real vacation does not involve being a self-flagellating hermit. He pointed out the library, the local pub, and a popular bakery that had recently gone back into business since the owners had been returned to existence. 

Steve heads to the library. He hasn’t gone to a library to check out books since the 40s. No time, really, and with his back pay, he could afford to buy any books he wanted to read, anyway. The library is close to empty, with only a few patrons and one solitary librarian managing the front desk. Steve doesn’t yet know what he wants to read, but he has the time, so he spends about an hour wandering the shelves.

Most of the titles are unfamiliar, but then he notices one vaguely familiar to him. At first, he thinks it’s because of the name: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. But then he remembers Bucky raving about it, before the war. 

Bucky had always been the reader of the two of them. He was voracious, devouring anything he could get his hands on from dime novels to the old classics. Steve always got the stories anyway, second hand, so he never saw much point in reading fiction. In their old apartment, on rare days off for Bucky, they’d sit together at the table, Steve with his nose in a newspaper and Bucky riveted by whatever book currently had his attention. 

Steve pulls the book from the shelf. It’s old, and when he opens it, that dusty smell of aged paper and ink puffs from the pages. He inhales, and it’s like he’s transported back to his childhood, where Bucky would practically shove dusty old books that used to be his father’s up Steve’s nose, and he would get one good whiff of the smell before his asthma sent him into fits of coughing. He doesn’t cough now, but sometimes, when he knows it would have happened before the serum, he gets a phantom tickle in his throat, and he reaches into his back pocket for long-gone cigarettes prescribed to help his asthma.

He doesn’t remember the plot of the book, though he’s sure that he had once heard the whole thing from Bucky, but it’s a connection to a past that he missed perhaps a little too fondly. And, maybe, more importantly, a connection to a friend who had since grown distant and unfamiliar. 

With the paperback in hand, Steve walks back to the front desk.

“I’d like to get a library card, please.” 

The librarian doesn’t seem to recognize him until she asks his name. 

“Oh—” she says, a little surprised. “You’re—”

“Yeah,” Steve says a little too quickly. “That’s me.”

She looks a little sheepish. “Sorry, I imagine you get that a lot.”

Steve doesn’t know what to say, so he doesn’t say anything. When she slides the plastic card and a pen over the desk to him, he signs it and hands the pen back with the card and the book.

She scans the book and hands it to him. He’s about to turn to go when he hears her speak. 

“So you’re living near here, then?”

“For the time being, yeah. It’s supposed to be a vacation.”

She nods understandingly. Her face takes on a faraway expression as if she’s considering something, before she says, “You deserve it.”

Steve smiles a little wryly. “That’s what they tell me.”

He spends the whole day reading the book, even forgetting to eat lunch. Finally, the light filtering through the window starts to dim, and Steve looks up. He massages at his eyes and looks outside. Only a sliver of the sun can be seen over the treetops, but the sky above it is cast in shades of orange and pink that fade into a paling blue anyway.

He’s not quite relaxed— he’s been hunched up in this awkward position for several hours now, and his legs are properly asleep— but he’s almost comfortable. Maybe not physically, but reading until there’s no more light to read by is still familiar, even after over 80 years. 

Steve is ravenously hungry, so he fixes himself a six-egg omelet that leaves a lot to be desired after Sam’s cooking. Maybe he should learn how to cook for real. He has the time.

The next day, Steve has finished the book and has completed a list of things to do. He has always hated idleness. Sam also texts him the next day, while he’s in town.  
Sam: how are you holding up?

Steve: *picture of oil paints* 

Sam: Did you discover Bob Ross on Netflix?

Steve: Who?

Sam: LOL look up The Joy of Painting when you get home

Steve: I don’t know if I trust you.

Sam: You’ll like it. I promise

With several new books from the library, two canvases, a variety of brushes and paints, and a sketchpad with charcoal, among other art supplies, Steve finds his way back into the swing of art. 

He feels a little guilty about the canvas and oil paints. You can take the man out of the Depression but you can never take the Depression out of the man. It had been such a luxury then, for Steve to paint. He had taken some classes and fallen in love with the medium, but only rarely had he had enough money to splurge and be able to paint something that had been burning up inside him. 

Now, even though he has the money, it still hurts a little to see the prices on the large canvases. He doesn’t know what it is he has to paint, but he can feel it smoldering in his gut, and it’s big.

He starts off with a few charcoal sketches, eking out familiar lines before he even knows that he’s made marks on the paper. Bucky’s face, as it once was, begins to appear, sketchy and a little rough, but his face all the same. 

After a few more sketches, determinedly not Bucky, though the curve of the hand he had drawn was suspiciously like those hands he had known all his life, he remembers Sam’s suggestion. Steve is a little wary. People had played tricks on him before. The first and only time he had ever taken a movie suggestion from Tony was The Human Centipede. Still, Sam’s suggestion sounds a lot nicer than the fiasco that was The Human Centipede, and when Steve searches for it on the sleek flatscreen— anachronistically mounted on a wall papered with stripes and tiny flowers— it seems innocent enough.

As it turns out, Steve loves Bob Ross. He had never been much for landscapes, but after sketching along to an episode, Steve’s fingers are itching for a brush and paint.  
Before he starts the next episode, he pushes the couch out of the way and goes searching for an old sheet he can use to protect the floor. 

He and Sam hadn’t even touched the attic the week Steve moved in. But somehow, in his frenetic search for some kind of cloth to catch stray paint droplets, he remembered that it existed. The ladder to the attic is located in the upstairs hallway, just in front of the bathroom. The ladder comes down when he pulls the string, and he looks at it a little suspiciously. It does not look like it could hold the weight of an average adult man, let alone Steve himself. Still, he gingerly puts his weight on the first rung and begins to climb.

He pulls himself through the hole and into the dusty attic with a grunt. That familiar itch in his throat starts, but this time, he really does cough because it’s just that dusty, and it had all been kicked up by Steve’s less than graceful entrance. It takes him a little while, but he does find sheets in a trunk near the front of the mess. Steve is thankful he doesn’t have to wade through the mess, especially since he can’t rise to more than three-quarters of his full height in the place where the ceiling is highest. 

He climbs down the rickety ladder and finishes setting up his painting station. Painting alongside Bob Ross is the most fun Steve has had in years. For the first time in a long time, Steve is genuinely grinning. His pants are completely ruined with paint, and his shirt is not far behind, but his painting looks pretty damn good if he does say so himself.  
Making sure the paint on his palm is dry, Steve reaches into his back pocket and pulls out his phone. He takes a picture and sends it to Sam. 

Sam’s reply is almost instantaneous.

Sam: Looking good!

Steve: *thumbs up emoji* 

Steve looks at the still drying landscape on the easel and then at the bright white canvas leaning against the wall. 

That smoldering of an idea ignites.


End file.
